


Quinquies

by Anonymous



Series: De Ave Phoenice [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Piercings, Rape Recovery, Sexual Slavery, Tango, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 03:08:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4463174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of five times-type ficlets set in the same universe as "Ex Cinere" and "Vox Populi".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quinquies

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you who may have missed the updated notes in Ex Cinere: Real life exploded, and the main fic won't be updated again until probably September, and I am distracting myself from my problems by writing various other ficlets, of which this is one.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five aspects of Dorian's appearance Danarius no longer controls, and one that's slightly more complicated.

**1\. Clothes**

Danarius had overseen Dorian’s wardrobe with the same care and attention he oversaw all other aspects of Dorian’s existence: with a minimum paid to Dorian’s needs and a maximum paid to Danarius’ whims, whether he was using Dorian as a set piece in some convoluted game with another magister, or simply for his own amusement.

Looking pretty was the foundation of his duties on any given day. That didn’t mean very much if Danarius was in one of his _moods_ , as apparently he looked pretty enough bawling his eyes out and wearing nothing but bruises, an assortment of bodily fluids, and whatever restraints had caught Danarius’ fancy.

But, generally speaking, he was allowed clothes.

They were just… he really hated those clothes, all blues and greens with gold trimmings. Peacock colors. Danarius always had a thing for animals, for treating his slaves as pets- even if he never took it as far with Dorian as he had with Fenris, it was still there. The worst of it had been the collar for him: the enchanted leather had been covered with crushed blue velvet, and the gems which studded it had been chosen and set so as to be reminiscent of the eyes on a peacock’s tail feathers. It was a constant reminder that he was an object on par with the birds on the Pavus estate in Qarinus, that his freedom and his magic had been taken from him, and he had no control over what was done to him any longer. He couldn’t even openly speak of what had been done to him- he had to pretend like the collar was a tasteless choker he adored too much to remove.

The trousers were always either uncomfortably tight, leaving nothing to the imagination, or else they were the seroul-style garments he’d only ever seen on bathhouse attendants or whores before. He didn’t have a proper shirt the entire twelve years he was enslaved: he had vests, and one traveling coat, and one set of formal long-sleeved robes for those times when he was expected to join Danarius in the Magisterium itself. Shoes were even sparser than shirts. Danarius had a pair of sturdy boots made for when they went to Seheron to find Fenris, but other than that he had only sandals: pretty, ornamental sandals, with thin soles that would start to fall apart within the day if he walked around in them too long. He went barefoot when he was indoors. It didn’t take long before he stopped putting the sandals on every time he went out onto the estate grounds either.

The smalls were the worst, however. They were the sort of clothing Dorian might have once chosen for himself, would have spent far too much of his father’s money on out of sheer spite, even. Form-fitting, silken things, trimmed with lace and sparkling embroidery… they were made to be admired.

Danarius rather ruined such undergarments for him with his admiration.

It wasn’t as though he never bought any nice smalls anymore, but he wasn’t wearing them all the time, and ‘nice’ was a rather relative term, wasn’t it? They were nice compared to the smalls he now wore on a daily basis, but they were rather plain compared to what Danarius had allowed him.

Most of his wardrobe was. Oh, his clothing was still of exceptional quality, and was still flattering. It was _his_ clothing, after all. But he tended for the sort of hard-wearing clothing that was suited for a lifestyle that included ‘fighting slavers on the Wounded Coast’, ‘fighting corpses on Sundermount’, ‘fighting gangs in the sewers’, ‘fighting blood mages that rained down from the fucking sky’ and ‘having dinner in The Hanged Man’, to say nothing of the change in climate from Minrathous to Kirkwall. There was a fair amount of wool and leather involved, and no small amount of fur trim: very little of his clothing was blue or green.

He had a lot of shirts now, many of them with long sleeves: what vests he owned he wore over them. He had no less than five pairs of durable boots he probably could have walked to Halamshiral in without issue, and the only thing around his neck were the scarves he stole from Fenris’ mansion to ward off the chill.

Well, stolen scarves and the love bites Fenris tended to leave there, as the others were always quick to point out. Dorian couldn’t really say that he minded all that much. It was nice, in a way, having a mark of belonging _with_ someone, rather than to them.

* * *

 

**2\. Hair**

Danarius had been particular about Dorian’s hair, or rather, about his desire that he have comparatively little of it. His eyebrows were generally left to his own management, and other than dictating regular haircuts the hair on top of his head was left to Dorian as well. Everything else, though, had to go.

There was a spell which prevented body hair from growing, and facial hair as well. It had to be replenished every other month: at first Danarius himself had done it, and then had his apprentices handle it, and then Dorian had done it to himself, and then finally the duties fell back upon the apprentices once more when the collar had gone on. Hadriana had been a torment, of course: she’d claim the need to examine him for any hair that might have been missed, and proceed to grope until Dorian was trembling with the suppressed need to run. Varania had been rather professional about the whole business. He’d appreciated that.

She’d been the last person to apply that spell, the day they’d arrived in Kirkwall. Danarius had had her do it in front of the entire retinue, a bit of public humiliation that he’d been grateful had ended in Danarius deciding to inspect him in private instead of out in front of everyone.

It took three months for the spell to fade enough for him to appreciate the difference, and nearly another three before he could truly say that he had his body hair back again, but it was all there now. He had a sparse dusting of hair on his chest that condensed into what Isabela informed him was known as a ‘happy trail’ over his abdomen and down to the thick thatch of hair sprouting around his cock. There was hair on his legs, under his arms, _on_ his arms- he’d almost forgotten that hair grew there, but it did, fine soft strands that were nearly unnoticeable against his skin unless there was a chill in the air to make them stand upright.

And he needed to shave his face again. _That_ had taken some getting used to: he hadn’t had to shave since he was a teenager, and he hadn’t quite been able to grow very much of it back then. He could now- if he didn’t shave every day he got a shadow of stubble over the whole of his chin, as a matter of fact.

He was considering not shaving, at least in part. He didn’t want a full beard, but he thought he’d look rather dashing with a moustache, and maybe a soul patch or goatee. He’d almost certainly look more his age- he was getting very tired of being addressed as a boy when he was now over the age of thirty.

He hadn’t decided what he wanted to do yet. It wasn’t a problem he needed to address right away- it was barely a problem at all. He had time to experiment with different styles, if he wanted.

* * *

 

**3\. Piercings**

Some years into his tenure as a slave, Danarius had developed a fascination with piercing him. That was a bit of an understatement: Danarius had had him pierced in places he’d really never considered putting bits of metal, much less _wanted_ to put bits of metal. He’d stretched Dorian’s earlobes with heavy gauges, studded his left nostril, his tongue, his right eyebrow, the bridge of his nose. Dorian had several pairs of nipple rings, ranging from relatively discrete bars to rings big enough for Danarius to hook his thumbs into and yank, and another ring in his naval: occasionally, Danarius had put a chain on to connect the three.

He’d had an Archon’s Crown put in, six dydoes placed equidistant from one another around the flare of the head of his cock. Dorian had known about that one before Danarius- he’d learned to deep throat from a whore with such a piercing, as a matter of fact. On the other hand, the guiche ladder wasn’t one he’d encountered until it was being put on him: ten barbells placed very close together on his perineum. A year later, Danarius had extended it with a hafada ladder in his scrotum, which was also something Dorian hadn’t even known was possible. He’d talked often of extending it even further, onto his frenulum, though thankfully he’d died before Dorian had ever had to learn what _that_ kind of ladder would be called.

Danarius had allowed him to take his piercings out on the voyage to Kirkwall, once it became obvious that Dorian was going to spend those months in state of near-perpetual seasickness. Between that and the lack of bathing facilities, it just wasn’t sanitary to leave them in under those conditions- probably, most of the ones on his face could have stayed, but Danarius had given him permission to take them out, so out they all came. He’d been sorely tempted to throw them into the sea- what was Danarius going to do to him while they were on a ship?- but held off. He’d still sort of been hoping that Danarius would decide that he could be trusted enough to have the collar taken off, and willfully throwing away his property would have been counterproductive to that aim. In the end, two of the crew had stolen the piercings and gambled them away in Llomeryn. Danarius had been furious when he’d discovered the theft, and that was how Dorian came to learn that on a ship you could be keel-hauled, which was yet more information he could have cheerfully lived his entire life without knowing.

The holes have long since healed over now, by and large. His earlobes would probably never quite recover fully, but had at least shrunken to a less noticeable sort of pucker. There was some scarring visible, small circles from the dydoes on his cock, and thin jagged lines on his areola from when Danarius had yanked too hard and torn through. Whatever marks had been left by the other piercings were small and easily overlooked.

He didn’t miss them. If anything, it was a relief to have all of that metal out of him for good. With all the fighting that living in Kirkwall necessitated- and how much getting hit in the piercing hurt- it was for the best that all of them were gone.

Somehow or another, this did not prevent him from waking up to discover that he’d gotten his helix pierced with absolutely no memory of the event. He also didn’t know why Isabela was nakedly cuddling a naked qunari with an equally naked guardswoman, but that was comparatively unsurprising, all things considered.

“I just don’t understand _why_ ,” he complained to Anders after receiving his repeated and increasingly annoyed assurances that his ear wasn’t infected and he could heal it well enough that it was unlikely to become so. “I was relieved to be able to take my piercings out. Why would I have more put in?”

“Maybe you lost a bet?” Anders suggested.

“But why would I bet that in the first place?” Dorian demanded.

“I don’t know, I’m a spirit healer, not a mind reader,” Anders replied. “Have you tried asking one of the others?”

“Isabela doesn’t remember what happened last night, and neither does Melindra,” Dorian reported. “Maraas claims to have taken a vow of silence concerning the evening’s activities.”

“Seriously?”

“He seemed very serious for about three seconds, and then he laughed for an uncomfortably long time, and then suddenly became quite serious again and said that he’d sworn never to tell before walking away,” Dorian said. “Bloody _qunari_.”

“Do yourself a favor and don’t try to make sense of the qunari,” Anders advised.

“I’d stop trying to make sense of them if they stopped being in my presence,” Dorian protested. “I was an academic, trying to make sense of things is what I _do_.”

Anders regarded him for a moment before asking. “Was there ever a point in your life where you wanted piercings? Before Danarius, I mean.”

“I-” the protest was on the tip of his tongue, where he could taste how stale and insincere it was. He swallowed it, and reconsidered. “It was too permanent. I could have gotten away with having my earlobes done, maybe, but the rest…”

There were _connotations_ to a great many of the piercings Danarius had inflicted upon him, after all. There was a reason he was familiar with piercings from his liaisons with whores, rather than with fellow apprentices. His father would never have stood for it, once he found out, and it wouldn’t have mattered where he’d gotten them, Father would have found out eventually.

Even _this_ piercing, which didn’t have any overtly sexual meaning, was rather lower-class- especially as it was in only the one ear. Asymmetry was for clothes, not for jewelry, after all.

“Well, I suppose none of that’s really a concern anymore,” he said, touching the rings. He’d have to get something new to put up there- the monkey thing that was currently in was a bit disturbing. “It’s in, I may as well keep it.”

“For what it’s worth, I think it looks good,” Anders said, reaching over to carefully heal the piercing around the earring.

“Well of course it looks good,” Dorian scoffed. “It’s on _my_ ear.”

* * *

 

**4\. Make-up**

Cosmetics had been a point of… not contention, exactly, but as close as you could get to it while also being a sort of truce, between himself and Danarius. It was one of those few things Dorian could both consider to be more or less reliable and derive some enjoyment from, like eating in the kitchen with the other slaves, or his work with Gereon. Danarius didn’t like that he liked it, but let it stand because it got him his desired outcome.

They both understood the necessity of Dorian having his face put on. Whether they were out in front of the public at large and Dorian was acting as the young trophy husband, or the setting was more intimate and comprised largely of people who knew what he was- catamite, concubine, body slave- he needed to look pretty. The make-up had been as much a part of that as anything else.

Danarius had liked to mess it up, naturally. He liked it when Dorian’s lips left streaks of color on his cock, he liked it when his tear tracks were stark with kohl, and he liked smearing the gold dust and rouge on his cheeks together with pretty much any bodily fluid you could name.

Dorian had liked to put it on. It could be a delicate, involved process, putting on your face. It bought him a good thirty minutes or so when Danarius was virtually guaranteed to keep his distance every time, lest he mess things up prematurely.

Now that he no longer has to worry about that, he has started dropping products from his shopping list. The lipstick was the first to go: he hadn’t had much use for it before Danarius, and certainly didn’t have any for it now. The rouge followed, and he traded the gold dust in for a bronze color that was closer to his natural skin tones.

The kohl stayed: he never considered otherwise. He’d been wearing it since long before Danarius, since before he’d discovered the joys of alcohol and the agonies of hangovers even. At this point he’d feel naked without it, which wasn’t a feeling he relished walking down the street with.

Or wandering around Sundermount with, as it happened.

“Dorian, can we please go?” Hawke whined. “You look very pretty, I promise.”

“How would you know?” Dorian scoffed.

“I’m a lesbian, not a blind person,” Hawke retorted. “Just because I’m not attracted doesn’t mean I can’t tell. It’s like noticing a river stone is pretty doesn’t mean I want to fuck a rock.”

“I’m not really sure how to take that statement,” Dorian said, arching an eyebrow at her.

“Don’t take it,” Hawke implored him. “Leave it and let us move on with our lives. There’s supposed to be a broodmother of a monster spider around here somewhere and I want to kill it before it has babies.”

“Give me one moment more,” Dorian said, turning back to his reflection in the stream. “Just because you don’t want to fuck the rock doesn’t mean that the rock doesn’t want to feel like a pretty river stone.”

“Is this conversation supposed to make sense?” Sebastian asked as he wandered over to the stream bank. He and Aveline must have finished packing up camp then- so it really _was_ time for him to get a move on.

“It’s a metaphor,” Hawke explained.

* * *

 

**5\. Physique**

Being Danarius’ Dorian had trained his body to do all sorts of useful things. He’d built up an immunity to magebane and a half dozen other poisons. His pain tolerance was incredibly high. He knew how to get by for weeks on nothing more than an hour or two’s worth of catnaps a day, and how to get by for days on a few mouthfuls of food.

Perhaps his favorite changes were the musculature and the ability to actually, physically do things with his body, because he could enjoy those changes, even if they were a product of Danarius’ desire to have a fit husband.

At first, Danarius had arranged for dance lessons to keep him in shape. Those had been rather fun, all things considered. He’d already known most of the dance of the ten veils (it was another thing he’d learned from whores) and it was nice to have a complete knowledge of it. Other forms of performative erotic dances swiftly followed, and then once Danarius was sure that he wasn’t going to cause the sort of public scene that couldn’t be explained away, partner dances came up next. Those had been less fun to learn. Even though Danarius himself was almost never present at those lessons, he still knew that he’d one day have to perform these steps out in front of an audience and pretend that having Danarius’ hands all over was a delight. Still, they’d had their moments. The first time he’d ever made Fenris laugh was during one of those lessons.

Later, after the collar went on and he no longer had magic to defend himself against potential assassins, he learned to fight, to physically engage in combat. It wasn’t wholly unfamiliar: he’d drilled with staff forms before, of course, but back then he’d been learning to move his staff to better direct a fireball at his opponent, or make his opponent think he was about to unleash a fireball when he was priming a glyph to explode beneath their feet instead. Physical staff fighting where the staff was a weapon rather than a means of conduction consisted largely of ‘your opponent has a large sharp piece of metal in their hands and I expect you to not let them touch you with it’. The Fog Warriors, he gathered, had some fighting style for staves (it allowed them to more easily conceal which of their members were mages from the Qunari, or so he gathered) but it hadn’t been Siesyll’s preferred fighting style, so he’d only known the basics of it. They’d made do, sort of: mostly Dorian had tried not to end up on the ground too often and failed miserably.

No one had been more surprised than Dorian when the first and only time Danarius played ‘my body slave can beat up your body guard’ ended in his victory after about a minute of fighting.

Sometimes, when Danarius wanted him to struggle (or pretend to struggle, really) and he’d twist or push harder than his husband expected him to, he’d entertain the fantasy of facing Danarius when neither of them had their magic and winning handily. It was only a fantasy, though: Danarius didn’t train his body, but he _did_ regularly perform a number of rituals to increase his strength, his endurance, his ability to heal and so on and so forth. Dorian wouldn’t win against that, and they both knew it.

Training was different now. He had dagger throwing and unarmed fighting practice with Hawke (who was always up for doing anything unrelated to Kirkwall’s political mess) and sometimes Isabela (who proclaimed very loudly that she was only there for the view and had no altruistic motives whatsoever). He sparred with Fenris, the familiar clash of a greatsword against his staff softened by the company, and he relearned combat magic with Anders’ help. He fought, often, against the various imbeciles that had convinced themselves that somehow they were going to be the ones to defeat Hawke, and he _won_.

He still danced, too, but it was different now that there was no Danarius to worry about. He wasn’t dancing to play happy husbands, or to make the other magisters jealous. No, now he could dance because he was surrounded by friends and there was music playing with a catchy beat.

“This looks like a fun dance!” Merrill said. It was apparently Antivan night at The Hanged Man, and the festivities had spilled out onto the Lowtown streets long before they arrived, the windows thrown open to allow the music the flow out and orders for drinks to flow in, the press of people warding away the chill of the approaching winter. Dorian caught a glimpse of the lead bandonion player in the group of troubadours providing the music; he was about two-thirds of the way certain that ‘she’ was actually Zevran in a wig and a dress.

Dorian was debating whether or not to call attention to this- on the one hand, that could mean trouble, on the other hand, nobody stepped outside their front door without anticipating trouble these days, and that did not necessarily mean that this trouble needed to be dumped on Hawke- when Merrill continued by asking “Does anyone know what it’s called?”

“It’s a tango,” both Dorian and Isabela replied.

Isabela’s face lit up. “Sweet Pea, do you know how to tango?”

“Well, yes, I-”

Isabela had grabbed him and pulled them into the Hanged Man before he could finish his sentence. Merrill and Hawke were hot on their heels, and the rest of the group fought their way inside before the next song started.

“I only ever learned the woman’s part!” Dorian protested as Isabela dragged them into the center of the room.

Without missing a beat, Isabela removed one hand from his shoulder and placed the other on the small of his back.

Dorian laughed and gave in. “Fine,” he said with a long-suffering eye-roll, and followed her lead.

Merrill and Hawke stuck close to them at first, Merrill copying Isabela’s movements and leading despite the way her slight frame was swallowed by Hawke’s larger one. As the tempo increased, however, they bowed out, retreating to the edge of dance floor and merely swaying against one another, leaving Dorian and Isabela to run through some of the more complicated steps unhindered.

“Fenris is seated by Maraas’ usual table,” Isabela told him. “He’s _blushing_.”

Dorian caught sight of him next time he was dipped. “Up to the tips of his ears,” he confirmed gleefully. It just wasn’t fair that Dorian do all the blushing in their relationship.

Their _relationship_. It was such a strange thing to think, even within this (objective speaking, probably much stranger) context.

Naturally, that was when three of the other tangoing couples rushed at Zevran, who pulled a smoke grenade of some sort out from under his skirt, didn’t quite manage to lose his pursuers in the ensuing stampede, and was rescued by a tiny slip of an elf he later learned was the fucking _Hero of Fereldan_ before any of them could come to his aid, so perhaps he should just stop thinking of things in his life as being strange. It wasn't like he had much of a standard of normalcy to begin with.

* * *

 

**+Brands**

Danarius had threatened to have him branded fairly often, both in the metaphorical sense of making him Tranquil and in the more usual manner of punishing a troublesome slave. For a long time, Dorian hadn’t really put much stock in those threats. Danarius couldn’t have him branded without upsetting the illusion of their happy marriage he’d built up over the years- the fact that Dorian had pushed him to empty threats at all was a victory, of sorts.

That illusion had lasted until the night, perhaps a year or so before his death, when Danarius had been tracing his fingers along the insides of his thigh and started to talk of burning his crest into Dorian there, where no one else would be able to see it.

“Does that mean you’re going to be keeping me all to yourself now?” Dorian asked. The vitriol and sarcasm that would have saturated the question had it been asked a few years earlier was so far suppressed that even Dorian didn’t remember that it should have been there until later, and the only thing coloring his tone was the thin reedy hope that maybe, just maybe…

“Where no one else would see it without my permission,” Danarius corrected himself, climbing on top of Dorian once more.

“Ah,” Dorian replied. Then he closed his eyes and let things happen.

There were some thing that Dorian had to talk himself into resignation to over and over again, because as much as he knew that they weren’t battles he could afford to have, he still felt an instinct to make Danarius fight them. Being branded wasn’t one of them- the thought honestly didn’t bother him as much as it once might have. Yes, it would have marked him as property, but that was old news. It had been years since playing the slave to avoid Danarius’ wrath had turned into playing a free man for the public eye. It wouldn’t have just declared his status, however: being branded was the mark of a _fugitivus_ , a runaway, a troublemaker. Slaves were branded when they paid grief onto the people who bought them. It marked them as dangerous, as people who’d fought.

Danarius would make it as painful and humiliating as he possibly could, he knew that. But Danarius made Wednesday nights as painful and humiliating as he possibly could, and at least this would leave him with a mark people might look at and know that he hadn’t always gone quietly.

Dorian had rather liked the sound of that. That was probably why Danarius had never actually done it.

He thought about that, sometimes, when he was pressed against Fenris, feeling the hot, smooth lines of lyrium as they interrupted his skin. It was never a very long thought, and he didn’t know what direction it would have gone in. It wasn’t like he wanted to be branded, and if he knew of a way to remove Fenris’ brands without killing the man they’d at least have had several very serious discussions about it.

But. Well.

They hadn’t just fought, they’d won, and Danarius was dead. It still seemed difficult to believe, at times: like perhaps he’d turn around and realize he’d merely had a particularly vivid hallucination.

He supposed if it was still nagging at him, he could have something commissioned for the anniversary of his death, as a reminder that it was all over. He could have something made for Fenris too: perhaps matching decanters or amulets or something of that ilk. Rings, even, for all that rings symbolized-

Well. There was no reason why the rings couldn’t symbolize more than one concept, provided Fenris was amenable.

That might be a matter more appropriate for the second anniversary of Danarius’ death, however. Or perhaps even the third.

(Or the fifth: when they will have more or less moved into Skyhold and Dagna will be around to craft them with the specially enchanted ability to pass messages to one another, and Varric will deny to his dying day that he cried just as much as Cassandra, if not more so.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Terminology:  
> -I mean vest in the American sense, so basically a sexy waistcoat to the rest of the English-speaking world.  
> -Seroul-style trousers basically means harem pants. (Am I being consistent in my use of trousers vs pants? Probably not, and I apologize).  
> -Not mentioned in this fic, but [this](http://41.media.tumblr.com/0380707a00d720739c4febd7e8df9ba8/tumblr_nifdrfuprL1qdgoc1o1_500.png) lovely image was brought to my attention by the lovely OP [Kariki](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kariki/pseuds/Kariki) way back in chapter one of Ex Cinere, and I feel obliged to link to it now.  
> -By Archon's Crown I mean King's Crown. And in case you were curious, a ladder of piercings on one's frenulum is just called a frenulum ladder.  
> -Tango originated in Argentina waaaaaay after the borderline-Renaissance period I see Dragon Age as taking place in was over with, but eh. I got the image of Isabela leading Dorian through a tango in my head and could not get it out.  
> -Maraas is growing on me. Sergeant Melindra is the Act I guardswoman who absolutely does not pay you for getting rid of the Sacred Ashes con-artist, but rather just clumsily drops some coin into your hand completely on accident.  
> -I still don't know if I chose wisely on rouge vs rogue.  
> -Why is Zevran assuming the role of cross-dressing troubadour? Why wouldn't he be?


End file.
